Page "Cave painting" Paragraph 8

The most common themes in cave paintings are large wild animals, such as bison, horses, aurochs, and deer, and tracings of human hands as well as abstract patterns, called finger flutings.

The species found most often were suitable for hunting by humans, but were not necessarily the actual typical prey found in associated deposits of bones ; for example the painters of Lascaux have mainly left reindeer bones, but this species does not appear at all in the cave paintings, where equine species are the most common.

Drawings of humans were rare and are usually schematic rather than the more detailed and naturalistic images of animal subjects.

One explanation for this may be that realistically painting the human form was " forbidden by a powerful religious taboo.